Psychological distress from mental health issues like depression and anxiety can take a toll on retirement savings, a new study suggests.

“If your anxiety makes you think you’re not going to live long, or makes you discount the future, you might not want to save.”

Three factors make the research even more meaningful, its authors say: People increasingly are living longer, dealing with more psychological distress, and shouldering the burden of saving for retirement without the help of employers.

The study, which appears in Health Economics, found people with anxiety and depression are nearly 25 percent less likely to have a retirement savings account. Their retirement savings as a share of their overall financial assets can be 67 percent less than those of people without psychological distress.

Psychologically distressed married couples, the study found, have retirement account values that are 20 to 28 percent lower. On average, that translates to between $15,000 and $42,000 less held in retirement savings for married couples.

“Mental health problems could potentially exacerbate problems that households are already having managing their retirement portfolios. If that is the case, then we will have widening inequality as households with mental health problems earlier in life have fewer financial resources in retirement,” says lead author Vicki Bogan, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.

The landscape for how people save for retirement has changed over the past several decades, Bogan says. Now far fewer employers offer traditional pensions. Instead more companies have defined-contribution pensions, where both employees and employers contribute; but it’s up to the employee to figure out how much she’ll need to contribute to have enough money in retirement.

“That’s a harder problem for an individual to figure out,” Bogan says.

And additional factors compound that problem, she says. Other research suggests close to 30 percent of the US population have at least one mental or substance abuse disorder each year. Furthermore, the elderly population is growing and Social Security is in a tenuous state, Bogan says.

The researchers hypothesize two mechanisms could be at play. Psychological distress could affect a person’s tolerance for risk. Psychological distress also could cause a person to be less likely to invest in illiquid assets that they can’t access immediately.

“If your anxiety makes you think you’re not going to live long, or makes you discount the future, you might not want to save,” Bogan says. “You might think, ‘Why should I save for that? I might not be around.'”

The research has implications for employer management and government regulations of defined-contribution pension plans, Investment Retirement Accounts (IRAs), and Keogh retirement accounts, she says.

One possible way to address this issue would be for employers to adopt a 401K opt-in policy, she says. Employees would be automatically enrolled in a 401K plan; they could opt out at any time.